Tag Archive for 'Doc Soup'

A Table In Heaven

Published
by
James McNally
on December 5, 2007
in Doc Soup, Documentaries, Film Festivals and Hot Docs
. Closed

A Table In Heaven

A Table In Heaven (Director: Andrew Rossi, 2007): Sirio Maccioni first opened Le Cirque in New York in 1974, after years and years of working his way up from busboy to waiter to maître d’hôtel. His star rose through the 70s and 80s and the restaurant attracted the rich and famous, including Henry Kissinger, Pope John Paul II and President Ronald Reagan. But as the film begins in 2004, the place has grown a bit stale, and the crowd of old regulars (and the emphasis is clearly on “old”) are dying off and no new customers are replacing them. Sirio decides to close and reopen in a new location. With his three sons Marco, Mario and Mauro, he sets out to plot the future of the family business. A new restaurant will be a fresh start, with a new location, a new chef, a new menu, and a new attitude. At least that’s what the younger generation wants. Sirio is from the old school, though, and is not willing to give up his micromanaging ways. Andrew Rossi’s camera was there to capture it all: Sirio’s charming tale of an uneducated Tuscan immigrant made good, his years of building relationships with New York City’s most rich and famous denizens, the gradual fading of his reputation, and then his family’s often fractious effort to get their groove back. Though it seems at times like a particularly rancorous episode of the Food Network’s Opening Soon, there are greater forces at work in the Maccioni story. Sirio complains bitterly of getting old, and refuses to retire. And yet the restaurant culture has changed and passed him by. His sons recognize this and want desperately to attract a younger clientele, but Sirio’s loyalty is to the people who helped him make it, and it hurts his new venture. Resistance to change is really about the fear of oblivion (through death and forgetting) and Sirio’s struggle is one that all of us can understand.

Luckily, the story doesn’t end when the film does, and it appears that the new Le Cirque is finally adapting to the new environment. Instead of singling out celebrities and treating everyone else as second-class citizens, the new culture prefers that everyone have the same experience, and from all accounts, they’re trying. The menu has been freshened as well, despite Sirio’s objections. A bad review from the New York Times, along with the footage of the opening, made it painfully obvious that the restaurant needs more than nostalgia and a charismatic owner to appeal to the new generation of diners.

Rossi has captured more than a restaurant or a family story. He’s given us a glimpse of a man on the run from his own mortality, a man who’s cultivated “friendships” among the most visible and powerful only to realize that it won’t save him in the end. It’s heartbreaking and a little bit terrifying. For me, the most satisfying moments are not in the restaurant at all, but around the table when Sirio’s longsuffering wife Egidiana serves up a simple meal of pasta to the whole family. It’s a shame that the man has so little time for that sort of meal.

Here is the Q&A with director Andrew Rossi from after the screening. Hot Docs/Doc Soup programmer Sean Farnel moderates and asks the first few questions himself:


Duration: 13:46

Official site for the film

7/10(7/10)

Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)

Published
by
James McNally
on November 8, 2007
in Doc Soup, Documentaries, Film Festivals and Hot Docs
. Closed

Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)

Manda Bala (Send a Bullet) (Director: Jason Kohn): First-time director Jason Kohn’s film was a controversial winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this past year, and after seeing it, I can understand why. It’s a travelogue of sorts, whisking us around Brazil to talk to police, politicians, prosecutors, businessmen, victims of kidnapping, and even a kidnapper himself. The film’s tagline is “When the rich steal from the poor, the poor steal the rich” and the basic outline is that it’s a film about a culture of theft. We see all the precautions the rich are forced to take to avoid the ransom kidnappings that are now widespread in cities like Sao Paolo. They buy bulletproof cars, they take helicopters and contemplate implanting microchips under their skin. We hear from a kidnap victim who had both of her ears sliced off, a common tactic of the kidnappers to show how serious they are. Kidnapping is such a growth industry that now plastic surgeons have developed ways of creating new ears from rib cartilage. On the other hand, we’re introduced to corrupt politician Jader Barbalho, whose graft included the establishment of frog farms to launder government grant money. Recurring images of the frogs, including a memorable sequence of one frog devouring another, seem to work as a crude metaphor. With a population of 20 million, Sao Paolo’s residents are just as crammed together as the hapless frogs, and the resulting anarchy is almost inevitable.

Kohn’s film is full of startling and often beautiful imagery, and his conscious decision to shoot on film and in anamorphic widescreen tells me a lot. Along with a jaunty soundtrack of Brazilian samba, the gorgeous images look better than they have a right to. I caught myself asking whether a film about such ugliness had a right to look so pretty. And I think that’s where my problem with the film lies. It feels like a carefully-constructed object that was planned around aesthetic, rather than moral, concerns. It looks great, but I’m just not sure there’s a real heart to the film. Many of the director’s choices seem calculated to distance the viewer from the horrors he’s observing. For instance, Kohn made the decision to forego subtitles in many of the interviews, including the kidnap victim’s. Instead, we hear the dialogue in Brazilian Portuguese, and then hear the translation in English from the translator, who is also in the frame with the subject. It’s a strange effect. As well, there is no attempt at any analysis of the problems of Brazil, other than a throwaway line about how the Portuguese established Brazil simply to plunder it.

I remember hearing as a young student about how Brasilia was designed from the ground up as the new capital of Brazil, and the film does convey some of the tarnished futuristic optimism that was coming out of the country in the 60s and 70s. Kohn described the film as a kind of “non-fiction science-fiction” film, and I think he does a passable job of conveying the feeling that Sao Paolo’s sinister landscape may soon seem very familiar to the rest of us.

But I’m still convinced that this is more an exercise in style than substance.

7/10(7/10)